The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “Don’t think so,” she told Shivs.

  “Well, it’s lucky you went, then, and not me!”

  “Yeah . . .”

  Jess fiddled with the green-and-white friendship bracelet that was wrapped around her wrist. Siobhan had made it for her in honour of Nigeria.

  Behind Jess, something heavy fell over (she suspected that it was the Christmas tree) and her mum said “Figs!” really loudly.

  “You know my cousin, Dulcie, the one I told you about?”

  “Yeah. She thinks she’s amazing.”

  “Yeah. Well, I taught her the new clap for ‘Finger of Fudge’ . . . She was sooo annoyed . . . and guess what, she didn’t even know ‘Milkman, Milkman’!”

  Shivs snorted with the full force of a girl who is known in her primary school as the queen of clapping games.

  “Not so amazing after all then, is she?”

  Jess was about to reply, but Shivs cut her off.

  “Guess what . . . You know the other day, when you tripped over that stick thing?”

  This turned Jess’s attention to one of several new puckered scars covering the areas between her kneecaps and ankles.

  “Actually, I didn’t trip—you pushed me, and it was this huge branch,” Jess corrected her friend.

  “Yeah, OK . . . Anyway, guess what happened when I was coming home! I found a GOLDEN GOO, man . . . in a capsule and everything—it was opened a bit, but still . . . I really needed a golden one, so I picked it up, and my dad pretended he didn’t notice, cause my mum would KILL ME for picking stuff up from the ground.”

  That was impressive, but also just Shivs’s luck. Most of the boys in Jess’s class would kill for a golden Goo. Jess said so.

  “Yeah, I know! But then this dog started chasing me and my dad, dinnit, and it was this big fat dog, and the woman who owned it was like ‘Ginger, Ginger,’ not really bothering to STOP IT or anything. And the dog was black, anyway, so why call it Ginger? Anyway, so it probably wasn’t her dog. So I think the dog thought we were playing a game with it or something . . . and I tripped over, and I hit my face, and I got a great big cut on my knee!”

  “Oh. What does it look like?”

  “It is going to be a BADMAN scar,” Shivs said grandly. “My mum put some stuff on it, but it’s going all peely.”

  “Wicked!”

  “I know!”

  “Are you going to tell anyone that you ran away from the dog?”

  “No way . . . I already told Katrina that I fought it and it bit me, and that I might have RABIES.”

  “Wicked!”

  “I know!”

  Jess thought she might be having some trouble with loyalties.

  On Saturday morning, she was spread out on her bedroom floor drawing pictures with TillyTilly and trying to think of something to say that didn’t have anything to do with Shivs. Tilly always seemed to get cross whenever she talked about her. After a few seconds she still hadn’t thought of anything, so she bowed her head and concentrated on the snake that she was drawing. It was a big fat green-and-black python squiggling across the page, and she had to use red to get the forked tongue right. She tried to look over at Tilly’s picture when she’d finished her own, but Tilly squirmed away, shielding her piece of paper with her arm. Jess exhaled gustily.

  “TillyTilly, are you cross with me?”

  TillyTilly looked up and sighed irritably before snatching the piece of paper before her, crumpling it into a ball and stuffing it into the pocket of her school dress.

  “You made me spoil it,” she complained.

  Jess waited patiently before repeating her question.

  “I’m not cross with YOU. I just don’t like Siobhan. I don’t think she’s a very good friend, not like I am.”

  Jess started colouring the white paper behind the snake a light green. She was perplexed. TillyTilly was much cleverer than her and knew nearly everything—so if she said that Shivs was a bad friend, then she must be right. But Shivs was funny, and always thought of fun things to do, and she didn’t think Jess was weird. So TillyTilly might have got it wrong this time. Maybe.

  “Why don’t you think Shivs is a good friend?” she asked, doubt smudging the features of her face.

  TillyTilly reached out and pulled angrily at Jess’s friendship bracelet until Jess had to drag her arm away in order to save it from being torn apart.

  “DON’T!”

  “You like her better than me,” Tilly said. Her voice was pitched slightly higher, tinged with the dawning of surprise.

  Jess issued a swift denial, “I don’t, I don’t,” her chief objective being to get Tilly to stop being cross with her. “Me and you are twins, and Shivs is just my friend—”

  But then, feeling as if she had betrayed Shivs, she added, “—and she IS a good friend, and really nice!”

  TillyTilly stared at her, unconvinced.

  “Don’t tell her about me,” she warned. Then, with a sly smile creeping over her face: “She’ll think you’re mad.”

  Jess felt her skin flush an angry red.

  “I know,” she muttered, tossing her green pencil back into the pencil box. “She wouldn’t understand about . . . all that.”

  “People who aren’t from the same place as us don’t understand about all that,” Tilly corrected her. “I came to you in Ibadan because you were sad, and all by yourself. And I came to you here because you were sad, and all by yourself. You had no twin anymore. And you wanted me to come,” she continued, as a note of reminder.

  “I know!” Jess found herself trying not to scowl. What was the matter with her? What Tilly was saying was true. TillyTilly was her best friend, and they’d gone to the amusement park, and Tilly was the only one who understood about Fern, and sometimes she was the long-armed woman who told stories and sang—

  “I’m not going to GO AWAY just because you have a new friend!” TillyTilly spoke from the chair now, her arms folded.

  “I KNOW,” Jess cried, then, realising that the sound was too harsh. “I don’t want you to go, anyway!”

  “I know!” TillyTilly mimicked Jess’s voice uncannily before springing off the chair and turning a perfect cartwheel. “D’you still want to be like me, Jessy?” she said as Jess gazed on in admiration.

  Jess thought about it, then realised that she didn’t, really. And that she hadn’t for some time. For a little while it had seemed to be . . . OK just to be her, Jess. She packed up the rest of the coloured pencils as she racked her brains for a tactful way to say it so that Tilly would be nice again, but when she turned around, TillyTilly had gone.

  That evening, Shivs and Dulcie were coming to stay over; Shivs by mutual agreement, Dulcie because . . .

  “I’m coming next time that clap-games girl comes around, OK?” (from Dulcie, at Christmas) and: “You can’t just FORGET to tell her! That’s a little shabby, Jess . . . I’m surprised at you!” (from Jess’s mum, the day before yesterday—blah, blah blah)

  Jess was unsure how she felt about Dulcie and Shivs meeting (what if they liked each other better?) and she was also a little indignant that she was expected to share her friends with Dulcie. When had she ever asked to play with Dulcie’s friends?

  Shivs phoned at five o’clock to say that she was about to get in the car with her dad to be driven over, and also that she was bringing her special glittery blue cat’s cradle string because she’d just remembered that Jess had told her Dulcie was rubbish at cat’s cradle. Shortly after this, Dulcie, wearing her show-off jeans with lavender glitter around the pockets and her blond hair in a glossy French plait, was dropped off by Aunt Lucy, who, tired and puffy, had started to look much more pregnant. Dulcie immediately bounded upstairs with Jess to display her new charm bracelet and (out of earshot) to complain about Sarah Harrison’s Barbie ban, while downstairs, Lucy’s brother tried to persuade her to stay and have a cup of tea “or something,” an offer wearily rejected with the assertion that if she didn’t head for home now, then she never would.

&nb
sp; Upstairs, once Jess had sufficiently admired the star saying “I wish . . .” and the moon saying “I dream . . .” and the heart saying “I love . . .” in tiny letters that hung from Dulcie’s silver charm bracelet, Dulcie bounced on the bed and looked in disdain at the two blow-up mattresses that dominated the floor of Jess’s bedroom.

  “Bags I this bed!”

  Jess, taking advantage of the falling dusk to creep to the window and draw the curtains closed, cackled wickedly and elicited a small scream from her cousin.

  “Oi, no, the bed’s mine. That’s the rules!”

  Dulcie clambered off the bed and stumbled her way to the light to turn it on.

  “No it isn’t!”

  “It IS, though—”

  “I’m telling Aunt Sarah! I’m not sleeping on the floor, my mum said she doesn’t like it!”

  “Ah, shut up! You slept on the floor before! You just don’t want to sleep next to Shivs ’cause she’ll see you with your mouth all open like uuuurghh . . .”

  They erupted into a twittering storm of giggles as Dulcie tried to grab Jess’s ponytail and chased her around the room as she leapt over the mattresses and scrambled across the bed.

  “I give up, stop, stop,” Jess panted, collapsing onto one of the floor mattresses, and Dulcie, smiling triumphantly with wisps of hair floating out of her formerly immaculate plait, fell onto Jess’s bed.

  “You’re all different again,” Dulcie commented, after a few moments in which Jess had crawled over to her cousin and was laughingly attempting to tuck the escaped hair back into its previous order. “I wish you’d just decide how you were going to be and sort of . . . well, BE it!”

  Jess was about to reply when they both leapt up in response to the sound of Colin McKenzie and his daughter being greeted downstairs. Shivs bolted up the stairs with her overnight bag slung across her body, shouting excitedly as Jess and Dulcie sped towards the staircase with Dulcie in the lead, resulting in a Shivs-Dulcie collision in which they both fell down. Jess hung back and let out a shout of delighted laughter as her mum came up the stairs and watched with her lips pursed and her hands on her hips in mock disapproval. Shivs and Dulcie rapidly untangled themselves and rose, each girl’s face stained crimson with embarrassment. Shivs looked particularly striking.

  “Er . . . sorry,” she managed, before tossing one pigtail over her shoulder and brushing past the still “ouch”-ing Dulcie to whisper to Jess, “Look at her hair!”

  Sarah had gone back downstairs, calling out to Colin that it was only a minor collision, and Shivs ran back to the top of the stairs to shout out “Bye, Dad!” before he left. Jess had to struggle to maintain a straight face as Dulcie instantly began to ingratiate herself with Siobhan. As soon as Shivs had thrown her overnight bag into the corner of Jess’s bedroom—“With stuff for later,” she promised with a devilish grin—Dulcie pulled out her hair bands and sat on the bed, running her fingers through her hair so that the plait was loosed and the straight yellow length of it fell down her back.

  “My hair got messed up before,” she said plaintively. Shivs looked unimpressed, but Dulcie forged ahead: “Could you and Jess do something else with it?”

  “Don’t mind.” Shivs shrugged and looked at Jess. Dulcie, who by now had assessed where the power lay, also looked at Jess. Under the pressure of all this looking, Jess tried to muster some authority.

  “OK, we can all have pigtails like Shivs. Shivs, you take that side of her head, and I’ll take this one—then you two can do my hair.” Accepting a hair band from Shivs, she took a deep breath and eyed both of them as sternly as she could. “Then we’re making puff-puff.” Shivs pulled a face at Jess, then snorted with laughter, busily smoothing out her half of Dulcie’s head of hair with her hands.

  “Sorree, your majestee,” Dulcie drawled, then looking upwards at Shivs, demanded: “So do you know any more clap games or what?”

  Shivs grinned and started plaiting, ignoring Dulcie’s yell of “Argh!” when she pulled too hard. “Too many for you, my little friend.”

  “Little! How old are you, then?” Dulcie asked, belligerent.

  “Nine.”

  “So’m I! So how am I your ‘little’ friend, silly!”

  “No, you’re the fool—I meant that,” Shivs paused and looked questioningly at Jess, “met-a-for-i-cal-ly.” When Jess nodded sagely over Dulcie’s head, Shivs looked triumphant, if a little confused, but Dulcie’s bewildered silence was enough for Jess to keep her reservations over whether Shivs’s statement actually made any sense to herself. She wasn’t exactly sure what a metaphor was yet, but they’d found the word in some long review that Jess’s mum had been writing about someone else’s book.

  Later that evening, Jess and Dulcie were in the kitchen with Jess’s mum and her friend Bisola Coker, Tunde’s mum. They’d just finished making their final batches of puff-puff and were carefully dropping them onto napkin-covered plates. Across the passageway, Shivs, who had gracefully bowed out of the puff-puff making when she’d realised that they weren’t just going to be watching Jess’s mum cook, was involved in an intense game of marbles (using marbles that, she’d proudly told them earlier, she’d stolen from her cousin Martin) with Jess’s dad. From what Jess could tell, Shivs’s victory whoops were met only by low groans of defeat from her father, and hardly ever the other way around. Jess was a little bad-tempered herself since both Mrs. Coker and her mum had commented that, overall, Dulcie’s puff-puff had come out better than hers.

  “Maybe you’re a bit African by association,” Mrs. Coker teased Dulcie, who nodded before turning to Jess with a superior smile and sticking her tongue out.

  “But I’m the Nigerian,” Jess wailed, flapping a napkin at her mum to get her attention. “You can’t SAY that!”

  Sarah smiled over at Mrs. Coker, then conceded, “Maybe it’s this new puff-puff pan. Maybe because Dulcie used it second, hers were more fluffy. It must be like Aunty Funke’s pan . . . the more you use it . . .”

  Jess ignored her. Everyone knew that it was all in the batter. She took a big, doughy bite of one of her own puff-puffs and declared that she thought hers were better anyway (and they were!), privately wishing that she and Shivs hadn’t agreed to call off the cat’s cradle contest. When Shivs followed Jess’s dad into the kitchen, cheerfully patting the marbles in her pockets and demanding “one of those puffy things,” Dulcie and Jess both rushed forward with their plates, covertly elbowing each other out of the way as Shivs looked from one plate to the other. Jess’s heart sank as she sniffed appreciatively at the air above Dulcie’s plate and said to her, “Yours are all nice and fluffy,” before she picked up one of Jess’s flatter, darker ones with a chipped-toothed grin. Her sleeve was rolled up from her marbles match, and a bit of the blue-and-white friendship bracelet that Jess had made her was showing.

  “Ohhhh,” Dulcie had just begun to complain when Jess’s dad leaned forward and scooped up one of hers, saying with a wink, “Sorry, Jess, but I just can’t resist Dulcie’s.”

  That night, Jess wrapped the covers around herself on the floor mattress farthest from the bed, Dulcie having after all bagged her bed and Siobhan the mattress in between. They had just finished a box of Cadbury’s Roses and a bumper bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps smuggled in by Shivs, whose skill for procuring chocolate seemed to grow in direct proportion to the severity with which she was forbidden it. Dulcie, having been, to Jess’s great satisfaction, knocked out of the clapping-game competition, had adjudicated the outcome of the final round: two-person Hanky Panky, Shivs versus Jess, which Shivs won. Dulcie was now complaining in the dark, a sleepy monotone diatribe. Shivs was fast asleep with her face turned into the pillow. Jess, too, was on the edge of sleep, Dulcie’s voice swimming in her ears.

  As Jess’s eyes flickered shut for longer and longer periods of time, she began to hear an underworld of sound beneath the normal one of Shivs’s regular breathing and the thin whine that she always heard in her ears when she concentrated too hard on he
aring. There was something else: faint at first, but stronger and stranger the more she listened for it. It was some sound stuck between the echo of bongo drums and the sound of something (a stone?) rattling inside an empty space, a hollow space, throbbing and clicking until she feared that it would shake the ground. Fighting the paralysis of sleep, she struggled to sit up, but when she did the sound chased itself away into the dark, leaving only a profound silence, like being under water. Jess stared around the room, watching the shapes of things in the shadows, then lay back down again, only to spring up, terrified, when Dulcie raised her head and gave a sharp scream from her bed.

  “TILLYTILLY,” Jess shouted before she could stop herself, scrambling up and jumping forward onto the bed.

  Dulcie was quivering under the covers, but she was alone, and all right. She seemed to be all right. Jess’s mum appeared at the door and put the light on.

  “What happened?”

  Dulcie, wide-eyed and pale-faced, looked into Jess’s pleading eyes, gulped hard then looked away and gave a shaky laugh followed by a more genuine, rueful one.

  “Nothing, Aunt Sarah. I’m sorry. I just thought something touched me.”

  When Jess’s mum had gone, Dulcie sat bolt upright in the bed and asked in a dramatic stage whisper, “All right, so which one of you crawled over and pinched my foot?”

  Silence.

  Jess and Shivs looked at each other in the dark, Jess’s heart pounding so hard that she thought she might be sick.

  Oh, TillyTilly, leave her alone, please, please.

  “Come on, just tell me! Whichever one of you it was, your hand was SO cold! I thought it was a dead person or something—” Dulcie’s voice had grown tentative, and she was now kneeling up on the bed, peering at them.

  Shivs started giggling helplessly. “It was me,” she spluttered. “I was only pretending to be asleep! Sorry, Dulcie, but your foot! It was just THERE, waiting to be pinched!”

  The wave of relief that washed over Jess had such force she was dizzied and nearly rolled off her mattress.